Every year, thousands of underground infrastructure damages occur in Quebec, endangering public safety and costing millions of dollars in repairs. How can we reduce these costly and dangerous incidents? Info-Excavation presents you Common Ground Alliance’s solution: DIRT, the Damage Information Reporting Tool.

What is DIRT?

It’s a free and confidential database allowing infrastructure owners and municipalities to report damages caused by excavation work near underground infrastructures. The objective is to accumulate data to analyze root causes and develop more effective prevention strategies.

Why use DIRT?

• 🔍 Easily report damages on your infrastructures: DIRT’s intuitive interface facilitates incident entry and analysis.
• 📊 Provide crucial data to Info-Excavation
• 📊 Contribute to annual damage reports in Quebec, Canada, and North America

How does DIRT contribute to prevention?

DIRT allows users to easily enter detailed information about incidents, including location, cause, and consequences. This data is then analyzed to identify trends and risk areas, improve training, and ultimately reduce the number of damages.

Your data is essential to our reports!

The collaboration of all underground infrastructure owners is necessary, and collective commitment will contribute to improving our prevention approaches. Reliable data will allow us to better measure progress in damage prevention.Your participation is the first step in obtaining more accurate results reflecting our industry.

How to participate?

Don’t let another damage occur without being documented.

Sign up for DIRT today by filling the following form and play a crucial role in protecting your underground infrastructures.

 

Learn more about DIRT

 

The ATLCGA held their Annual General Meeting on May 15^th, 2024. Highlights included the 2024 Business Plan, Joint Advertising Plan, Info- Ex Update, and election of Officers.

Innovative use of the Notification System

The Halifax Regional Municipality has taken an innovative step in expanding the use of the notification system. The Municipality’s infrastructure layers now include Municipal Tree Vaults and Soil Cells. This means that any planned works near these crucial parts of the Municipality’s green infrastructure will trigger a memo to locate requestors. This memo will advise them of the type of infrastructure present near the trees, and what to do if it is encountered during the works. This knowledge empowers us to avoid damage to the Municipality’s street trees, ensuring their health for years to come.

What’s next?

As locate request volumes increase across Atlantic Canada, the ATLCGA will ask its membership to consider the transition to 60-day Locate Validity.

60-day validity will not impact the remarking of faded paint, and re-validation will be used to ensure excavators receive valid locations when newly installed facilities affect their dig location(s).

Locate Validity periods vary across Canada. The ATLCGA will share more information with its members over the summer about the current practices of other regions and the potential benefits of the longer validity periods through the experiences of other regions. Make sure you’re a member of the ATLCGA and on the mailing list to be part of the conversation this season!

 

For more information about how to join the ATLCGA,  visit our website https://www.atlanticdigsafe.ca/en/Join and/or email us at [email protected].

 

 

The Canadian Common Ground Alliance is excited to hold its 2024 Damage Prevention Symposium, in person, at the Delta Regina, November 4th – 6th, 2024!

This event is a signature event for the CCGA attracting over 200+ damage prevention management professionals and decision makers from across Canada including stakeholder groups such as municipalities, excavator contractors, oil and gas, telecommunications, electrical transmission/distribution, water and sewer, telecom, emergency management, surveyors, regulators, trenchless industries, One Call Center members, utility locate service providers and administrators, engineers, insurance, risk management operations, and others who protect the underground infrastructure and impact damage prevention.

Join us for this dynamic and engaging event that is sure to provide practical, relevant information which will focus on damage prevention public awareness initiatives and expand stakeholder knowledge on efforts to protect essential infrastructure.

The format for the conference consists of 2 days of professional development, workshops, panel presentations, networking events, along with an exhibitor tradeshow.

Become a sponsor

Become an Exhibitor

For several years now, Énergir no longer systematically travels to work sites to mark the gas network following reception of a location request. For most types of work, only a sketch to localize the pipeline could be provided to the applicant.

How to do it?

Several tools to facilitate the understanding of the sketch and good practices in terms of ground disturbance work near the gas network are also always provided to the applicant.

You can also consult the energir.com/check-before-you-dig page at any time for more information.

We invite you to pay attention to the type of location report provided to you and to adequately inform the contractors or teams concerned.

Safety is everyone’s business!

Consult the tool to correctly interpreting localization plans.

 

We want to hear your comments and suggestions on our services and those provided by our member infrastructure owners, so that we can continue to offer you the best possible experience. You have until January 19, 2024 to complete our survey.

Your input will help us to continually improve our services. Please allow approximately 15 minutes to respond, depending on your profile.

🎁 Because your opinion is valuable, we want to thank you for your time. By participating in the survey, you’ll have the chance to win one of 5 $100 gift cards (SAQ, grocery or gas).

We look forward to hearing from you 🙏

Choose your province

Quebec

Atlantics

After consulting infrastructure owners, modifications were made to the drawing tools for the following types of work: planting trees, survey excavations/drilling and road signs. These modifications are tailored to your needs and will improve the locate request creation process.

Details Regarding Modifications:

• When a work area is added, a 2.5-metre radius will now be verified and be visible on the map instead of only the work area. This will allow you to visualize the entire work zone.
• The Work Zone tool and its adjusted zoom level is once again available.

Recommendations

Switch to Project Planning Mode! For projects generating a large number of locate requests, please spread out your projects over time using different excavation start dates. This will enable proper processing of locate requests and allow infrastructures to be located in a timely manner.

Modifications were made to improve the quality of the locate requests and make communicating with member companies easier.

• Drawing Tools

Some drawing tools will no longer be available for certain types of work. The limited number of tools ensures that the proposed drawing tools are best suited to each project type.

• Zoom Level

The zoom level available to sketch the work area now depends on the type of work selected. This ensures that details within the work area are clearly displayed, making it easier to analyze and identify which member company needs to be notified.

• Fields: Length, Width, and Direction

The length, width, and direction fields will be removed. Only the depth field will remain and must be specified on the locate request relevant to your project. This change will make it easier for our users to create a locate request.

• Creating a Locate Request – Warning

A new warning now appears when creating a locate request, stating that only the information relevant to identifying the member companies will be used. As of now, only the work area sketched in the locate request will be used to identify which member company needs to be notified. Please note that all additional files attached to the locate request will not be consulted or considered during our analysis.

• Additional Information Field – Warning

A new warning will be added stating that the information contained in the Additional Information field is for informational purposes only. The information cannot be inconsistent with the area drawn in the attached sketch. Please note that the information contained in that field will not, under any circumstances, be used to identify the member company which needs to be notified.

Please do not hesitate to contact us should you have any questions or concerns regarding these modifications.

Énergir would like to remind you that it has made changes to how it processes gas network location requests. The advent of new location technology means that Énergir can provide faster, more agile service to clients requesting locate reports, providing them with greater autonomy in how they manage their work.

New – Locate report on sketch only

Based on certain risk criteria, Énergir will now provide a locate report on sketch only. When these criteria are met, Énergir will not travel to the site to do ground marking. The marking can be done by the requester, using the information on the sketch provided by Énergir. This is a practice that’s highly recommended to prevent damage to underground infrastructure.

To make the process as easy as possible, Énergir has created how-to videos for different users.

• Contractors/Entrepreneurs
• Individuals / Particuliers

Énergir has set up a help line to support users with these changes. Requesters can get assistance in reading the report, among other things. Please call our dedicated teams as needed at 1-877-598-3038, or by email at [email protected]

Safety is everyone’s business.

 

The entire team would like to thank Denis Courchesne for his 11 years as president and director of Info-Excavation and his 19 years as a member of the Board of Directors. His dedication and commitment have allowed our organization to become a leader in damage prevention to underground infrastructures. We wish him an excellent and well-deserved retirement with the accomplishment of his personal projects.

We share with you Denis’ last words:

Hello everyone,

Today is my last day of work before my retirement. I have been in the job market for the last 50 years. My career started as a technician repairing audio-visual equipment for a school board, followed by 35 years at Bell in various management positions. In the last 11 years, I have held the exciting position as President and CEO at Info-Excavation. Throughout this journey, I have met extraordinary people, who occasionally have either confronted me, advised me or helped me in my work. Regardless of the role they played, I wish to thank these people for making me a better human being as well as a better manager. The time has come for me to bring this chapter to a close and start a new one. I am at peace with myself, while having many projects in mind… And that’s without counting on my wife’s projects!

To my successor Jean-Guy Côté: I trust that you will experience, if that is not already the case, the same passion that drives Info-Excavation. In the last few months, I have seen your implication and am optimistic that you will be able to bring the company forward.

I would like to thank you all for your presence. Rest assure that it will always be a pleasure to meet you if the opportunity arises.